4. Fox in the Hen House! – BioLogos Founder Rejects Adam

Continuing the Fox in the Hen House! series of blog posts exposing heresy about Genesis …

Is a scholar who proclaims,
“Adam is a myth!”trustworthy?

Such false teachers lead people astray concerning Genesis and concerning New Testament teaching based on Genesis, even to the point of subverting the Gospel.

The heretics include respected scholars claiming to be evangelicals. They question the truth of Scripture and undermine the doctrines of the divine inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible.

This series of reports focuses primarily on scholars associated with the BioLogos Foundation. BioLogos is committed to the marriage of scientism and Christianity through persuading Christians to accept evolution and billions of years for the age of the earth by arguing that Genesis 1-11 is mythical or metaphorical.

This fourth post of the series exposes the position of BioLogos on Adam, the progenitor of the human race. This post features quotes from BioLogos founder Dr. Francis Collins; the next post will highlight quotes from the BioLogos Senior Fellow of Biblical Studies Dr. Peter Enns. These quotes will show that they do not believe in Adam as a historical figure. They do not believe Adam was a real man that walked this earth.

“Certainly when it comes to the Garden of Eden, a question often asked is, were Adam and Eve literal, historical figures? … One thing I think we can rule out as a possibility is that Adam and Eve were created as special acts, separate from the rest of the animal kingdom.”

“Rule out?” Here Collins is directly denying the Biblical account in Genesis 2 of the creation of Adam and Eve. They certainly were created by a distinct act of God, separate from the rest of the animals. Scripture records that God made Adam from the dust of the ground, not from existing animals. He made Eve from Adam’s rib.

Continuing Collins’ remarks at the Pew Forum:

“On the other hand, I think you could make a plausible argument that Adam and Eve were historical figures, a pair of Neolithic farmers, at a time where the brain had reached the point of sufficient complexity for the arrival of the sense of free will – which then got misused – of the moral law and of the soul. Or, you could also make the case that Adam and Eve are standing in for that whole group of about 10,000 ancestors from which we are all descended. And that’s about the number. It wasn’t two; it was about 10,000. Just looking at the diversity and complexity of the human genome, you can’t really shrink it back much more than that. Or, some would argue that Adam and Eve were never intended to be historical. They’re allegorical; they represent all of us, and we are all going through that same experience of being given great gifts and then using our free will to break God’s law.”

“I think outside of the one that science won’t allow you to accept because it predicts things that can’t be justified with human genetic diversity, all those other options are potentially plausible.”

By “the one that science won’t allow you to accept” Collins of course means the literal sense of Genesis. His authority for determining truth is scientific opinion, not the clear Word of the Almighty, which he rejects. All the options which Collins accepts as plausible are clearly contradicted by Genesis.

Claire Brinberg of CNN asked this of Collins:

“I’m wondering how as a scientist and as a Christian you’re able to pick and choose. When you were speaking about Adam and Eve, you talked about the whole concept of things that science won’t allow us to accept. Science doesn’t allow us to accept any of these miracles. So how do you, as an individual, make the distinction between what you choose to accept as something that actually happened and something that did not?”

Brinberg put her finger on a key point. She recognized that Collins’ reason for rejecting Adam and Eve was based on current scientific opinion. Yet he doesn’t reject other miracles like the Resurrection, which science also does not recognize. What criteria does Collins use to reject one and accept the other?

COLLINS: “I think God gave us these two books: a book of God’s words and a book of God’s works. If we are empowered and given the opportunity to read both of them with the confidence that there should be consistency, then when we encounter something that seems to be an inconsistency, we have the tools at hand to try to sort it out. So when science tells me in a way that seems incontrovertible from many directions that the universe is 13.7 billion years old and not 6,000, then I’m convinced that that is an answer that is trustworthy and that is a reflection of God’s plan for creation. Therefore, a particular interpretation of a part of the Bible that’s been subject to a lot of deliberation long before we knew the science, namely, what is the age of the Earth, could be melded with that in a fashion that is not picking and choosing. It’s basically taking the truth that we have access to from all sources and trying to put it together in a fashion that’s coherent.”

“On the other hand, when it comes to a miraculous event like the resurrection of Jesus Christ, I don’t have any scientific data there. If somebody will present me a bone and convince me that that’s Jesus Christ, then my belief in the resurrection would be under severe threat. But that has not been presented. I suspect it will not be. So in that situation it comes down to the question, can I, as a scientist, accept the idea that at those very rare moments where science is not likely to provide you any data that God could suspend the natural laws? And I see no reason why that could not be the case.”

His criteria is not well-defined. It depends on personal predilections.

When Collins says, “science tells me…” he is overstating the case. Science doesn’t tell anything. What he means is that scientists give their opinions as to what specific data means. But those opinions, even if in the majority, are not infallible. There are many instances of majority scientific opinion of the past being dead wrong (for example, doctors used leeches to bleed George Washington to death according to medical science at the time).

Likewise, when Collins refers to a “book of God’s works,” he really means scientists’ fallible interpretations of a broken (by sin) world, not a literal book or authoritative explanation. The “book of God’s words” is an authoritative historical record that can be depended upon. The two “books” are in no wise parallel or comparable. One (the Bible) is written by God. The other, while claiming to be a book of God’s works, is really a collection of man’s opinions about past history.

At the Pew Forum Reihan Salam of Forbes.com commented that modernist religious traditions appear to be the less robust ones compared with those with orthodox (literal) interpretations and therefore maybe the robust (orthodox) ones should be cultivated. Collins replied by exposing his opinion of interpreting the Bible literally:

“It seems to me you’re proposing the idea, if I understood you, that maybe it’s a good thing to have religious traditions that continue to propagate the idea of a biblical literalism because – well, I can’t go there. It just doesn’t seem to me that you have a future if what you’re trying to propagate is based upon a house of cards.”

Collins does not accept a literal Adam & Eve because he has a faulty hermeneutic. Because of his loyalty and commitment to scientific opinion, he rejects a literal interpretation of the Bible.

Clearly, BioLogos and its founder Francis Collins do not accept the plain literal truth of the Genesis record. They do not believe in a specific individual named Adam who lived on this earth about 6,000 years ago. They do not believe in the single human pair Adam and Eve from whom all humans descended.

Instead of interpreting the scientific data in light of the truth revealed by Yahweh in Genesis, they pervert the Genesis record to fit an interpretation of the data that is currently popular among scientists, namely evolutionism and billions of years.